Awe... awe... AWE!

Your mac expert is certainly not one, and I am sorry for you. When I was managing hundreds of macs, I used radmind, and I could have easily scaled it to tens of thousands. (given appropriate funding)

'She refuses to use MS Entourage' She is actually correct there, but only because Entourage has this nasty habit on OSX of trashing its own database. *shakes fist*. We pushed people to mail because we did not have an exchange server, and we were sick of supporting it.

Radmind is definitely its own thing, and it would scare most people, as it asks a lot of the user. For small (up to 100-200 maybe) computers, apple remote desktop and a task server would work fairly well. It is a lot closer to SMS, and it is all graphical.

Apple's group policy like thing in open directory is rather good, but it doesn't do all the things that group policy does. It also does a lot of stuff that group policy cannot, so I really don't know if one could be called better.

I used to run a network with hundreds of apples with radmind. We installed the initial images with NetRestore (multicast for the larger influxes), and upon reboot, the computers would download their radmind certificate from LDAP and install all of the software that it needed.

It takes more up front time to set up and configure radmind, but it works wonderfully for almost anything you want to do.

radmind ftw

One of my good friends is a food scientist. She has her doctorate in it, and works in the field. She cooks almost all of her own food, and will rarely eat processed food, and never fast food.

It isn't just hippies.

It also let the US have sole control over Japan and not have to split it with the USSR. I don't think the nerds were thinking about that though, so I don't fault them.

Nerds are the ones that know how to use game theory, and I could definitely see that ending wars much faster than soldiers.

AD and GP often make no sense in the *nix world, as their are often much, much easier ways to do things.

Just because people get comfortable with a stupid way of doing things doesn't mean that Linux should copy it. Group Policy seems to be the current holy grail of MS System Administration, which seems slightly ridiculous, as much of it is either solutions looking for problems, or problems that were solved on *nix 10 years prior. But, without any specific things being requested, or details of the setup, it's rather hard to suggest pertinent things. It's linux, there are 5 - 500 different ways of doing things, but you only need to learn 1. The good news is that the 1 way will actually do what you want.

*nix is not about having huge systems that do everything, it is about having small tools that talk to each other in intelligent ways, and can be easily strung together to get almost any job done. The sysadmin tools are mostly like that too.

10Gbps is cheap enough that even third tier colleges are thinking about using it for their trunks and inter-rack links.

Infiniband is solving a way different problem.

Let 1000 people drink?

10 Gbps is already normal in server rooms. OC-768 is in the wild at around 40 Gbs. 100 Gbs is definitely around in labs, but I'm not sure if any of it is retail yet.

SATA doesn't have to be very fast, because a single hard drive isn't very fast.

Dude, the eco lobby has been pro nuclear for the last decade. If you want an enemy, look at who seems to be spending a lot of money on PR.

Partition it into two drives. Put the home directories on the second drive. Manage a build with radmind. Once a year, people come in and get the first partition wiped to get a new build. If you need more help, email me, jdobbie@gmail.com. (Yup, I've done stuff like this before)